Did Jesus Exist?

By Emeritus Professor Philip Davies
University of Sheffield, England
August 2012

I cannot resist making a contribution to the recent spate of exchanges between scholars about the existence of
Jesus—these mostly on the internet and blogosphere, and so confined to a few addicts, but the issue has always
been lurking within New Testament scholarship generally. Shortly before his death, Robert Funk had approached
me about the possibility of setting up the equivalent of a ‘Jesus Seminar’ for Old Testament/Hebrew Bible,
perhaps a ‘Moses Seminar’? I couldn’t see any scope for such an exercise (and still can’t), but have often
thought how a ‘minimalist’ approach might transfer to the New Testament, and in particular the ‘historical
Jesus’, who keeps appearing to New Testament scholars in different guises.

The new collection of essays Is This Not the Carpenter1
represents something of the agenda I have had in mind: surely the rather fragile historical evidence for Jesus
of Nazareth should be tested to see what weight it can bear, or even to work out what kind of historical
research might be appropriate. Such a normal exercise should hardly generate controversy in most fields of
ancient history, but of course New Testament studies is not a normal case and the highly emotive and
dismissive language of, say, Bart Ehrman’s response to Thompson’s The Mythic Past shows (if it needed
to be shown), not that the matter is beyond dispute, but that the whole idea of raising this question needs
to be attacked, ad hominem, as something outrageous. This is precisely the tactic anti-minimalists
tried twenty years ago: their targets were ‘amateurs’, ‘incompetent’, and could be ignored. The ‘amateurs’
are now all retired professors, while virtually everyone else in the field has become minimalist (if in most
cases grudgingly and tacitly). So, as the saying goes, déjà vu all over again.

I don’t think, however, that in another 20 years there will be a consensus that Jesus did not exist, or even
possibly didn’t exist, but a recognition that his existence is not entirely certain would nudge Jesus
scholarship towards academic respectability. In the first place, what does it mean to affirm that ‘Jesus
existed’, anyway, when so many different Jesuses are displayed for us by the ancient sources and modern NT
scholars? Logically, some of these Jesuses cannot have existed. So in asserting historicity, it is
necessary to define which ones (rabbi, prophet, sage, shaman, revolutionary leader, etc.) are being
affirmed—and thus which ones deemed unhistorical. In fact, as things stand, what is being affirmed as the
Jesus of history is a cipher, not a rounded personality (the same is true of the King David of the Hebrew
Bible, as a number of recent ‘biographies’ show).

Does this matter very much? After all, the rise and growth of Christianity can be examined and explained
without the need to reconstruct a particular historical Jesus.2
The persistence of Christianity owes most, in fact, to Constantine, who opted for it as the imperial cult, and
endowed it, creeds and fancy dress included, with imperial trappings. Next to him, we should credit S/Paul and
his missionary and literary efforts, and finally Jesus, in whose name all this was done, but who might not
have wanted to answer for the consequences. And it is how he was understood that matters, it is that which
created Christianity. And clearly, he was understood in many different ways, many of them obviously wrong
since not all can be right. All of the historical Jesuses can explain what follows, or are made to explain
what follows. Does it matter to the historian who or what he was, beyond mere curiosity?

What I can see, but not understand, is the stake that Christians have in the unanswerable question of Jesus’
historicity and his true historical self. Religious (as distinct from cultural) Christians are serenely placed
(my born-again mother is word-perfect on this) to testify that Jesus is alive now and that absence of proof is
precisely what faith means. I have respect for this position (nothing to do with my mother) and no ability nor
desire to prove such religious experiences wrong. I think they are wrong, but who knows (certainly not Richard
Dawkins)? What I do find ridiculous are those so-called believing Christians who are trying to prove from
‘historical’ reasoning that what they believe is true, even (as in the case of Dr Wright, it seems) stories
about saints let out of their graves [Matthew 27:52-3] who, it seems, never went back. Well, at least this
explains the existence of zombies. But what else?

Let’s abandon fatuous reasoning such as accepting miraculous stories because no-one would make them up (Wright,
the con man’s dream mark), or placing faith in ‘eyewitness’ accounts while actually admitting how unreliable
they are (Bauckham). Sophistry of this sort betrays an already accepted dogma looking for rationalization:
fides quaerens indicium. There are reasonable ways of setting out the historical problem, even if there
is no satisfactory solution.

So what do we have here by way of evidence for Jesus? No certain eyewitness accounts, but a lot of secondary
evidence,3 and of
course the emergence of a new sect and then a religion that demands an explanation. As the editors of Is
This the Carpenter rightly recognize (and Mogens Müller’s essay in the volume especially), we really have
to go through Saul/Paul of Tarsus. This is because his letters are the earliest datable evidence for Jesus,
and because, if we accept what he and the author of Acts say, his writing is almost certainly the only extant
direct testimony of someone who claims to have met Jesus (read that twice, and see if you agree before moving
on). We need not (and should not) trust everything S/Paul says or accept what he believes, but explaining
Christian origins without him is even more difficult than explaining it without some kind of Jesus. But in
S/Paul we are not dealing with someone who knew the man Jesus (his letters would have said so). There are
three accounts in Acts of an apparition (chs 9, 22, 26), including a voice from heaven.4
If this writer is correct—and the letters of S/Paul do not confirm the story in any detail—the history of the
figure of the Jesus of Christianity starts with a heavenly voice, a word (cf. prologue to Fourth
Gospel) perhaps on a road, even to Damascus.

We would be right to exercise caution over Acts’ dramatic account(s) of S/Paul’s ‘conversion’. But his
subsequent behaviour and writings entail that he believed Jesus to be a divine figure, and he did not come to
this belief by Dr Wright’s kind of reasoning. He thought Jesus told him, in as many words. He allows that he
had been engaged in either gang warfare or some kind of authorized inquisition against the Jesus sect but
changed his mind and now accepted that Jesus had spoken to him (from the sky?), so must have been resurrected
(not in itself a problem for a Pharisee to accept) and deified (in a sense that the letters never quite make
clear). The beginning of belief in the divine status of Jesus does not need to go back any further.5
Paul now went around telling everyone—well, we know what he wrote as he kept working out what all this meant.

But S/Paul himself wrote (1 Cor. 15) that Jesus had appeared to many others also after his death. The gospels
(and Acts) suggest rather fewer numbers. Were these claims made by the other followers before S/Paul’s
experience? What did they already believe about him that made them the object of Saul’s persecution? Can we
reconstruct a reliable profile of these beliefs from the gospels, all composed later than Paul?6
The problem at the heart of the Historical Jesus quests is to get behind S/Paul to some earlier historical
knowledge. It’s hard to see that we can, not through sources that we must suspect of having been influenced by
the claims of S/Paul.7

I realize that I have said nothing new in all this. In addition, I have not trawled through the massive
secondary literature.8
But the primary and secondary sources are few: what else is there to read? I have on the other hand thought
(and written) a lot about doing historical work with biblical literature. Am I inclined to accept that Jesus
existed? Yes, I am. But I am unable to say with any conviction what he may have said and done, or what his
words and deeds might tell us about who or what he thought he was. Even what his followers thought about him
is highly coloured with hindsight, embellishment, rationalization and reflection. Two articles in Is This
Not the Carpenter? (by the two editors, in fact) amass a great deal of evidence that the profile of Jesus
in the New Testament is composed of stock motifs drawn from all over the Mediterranean and Near Eastern world.
These parallels are valid: in trying to provide an account of who and what Jesus was such resources were
inevitably drawn upon, consciously or unconsciously by the gospel writers. But one should not argue from
these, as do Thompson and Verenna, that Jesus was invented. The use in this particular case of such mythic
types ought to have been provoked by something, and the existence of a guru of some kind is more
plausible and economical than any other explanation—which, by the way, does not necessarily make it the right
one, but historian’s rules apply: plausibility and economy are the trump cards. How quickly stories about a
guru can be manufactured, and how the outline of a possibly historically figure can be obliterated by all
kinds of creative ‘memory’ is clear from the Qumran allusions to the ‘Teacher of Righteousness’. Awareness of
such types and tropes should inform the historian how easily traces of historical reality can be painted over
in the colours of myth and the conventions of storytelling.

But why care? The issue of whether history or kerygma (let’s use the fancy theological term for such
fabulation) should provide the basis for New Testament theology or Christian faith has been a persistent theme
of New Testament scholarship since Strauss’s Life of Jesus (where myth reared its beautiful head).
Still, both history and theology converge on a proper answer to this: the historical Jesus will always be a
fabrication, and the search for him antagonistic to true religious belief. Yet some peculiar literal-minded
historicist brand of (largely Protestant) Christianity finds impossible the temptation to replace the icons of
Orthodoxy or statues and images of Roman Catholicism with the One True Image of the Lord: the Jesus of
History. The result: poor history and, dare I say, even poorer theology.

3
This includes two testimonies, from Josephus and Tacitus that require some very delicate judgment. Did
Josephus write of Jesus and thus know of him directly? What imperial records might Tacitus have consulted?
Lester Grabbe sets out the evidence well in his essay in Is This The Carpenter, but I think might be a
touch too generous.

4
This line of approach goes back to a drink I had with Christopher Rowland many years ago at a pub in London
and was, as I remember, his opinion, though he may not have developed it as I do here.

5
It might be argued that Saul should have classified Jesus as a vindicated and exalted martyr, not a god. But
the Jewish category of divine being is quite elastic. This topic needs a separate essay.

6
James Crossley has argued that Marks gospel was written c. 40 (The Date of Marks Gospel:
Insight from the Law in. Earliest Christianity, London and New York: T. & T. Clark, 2004). Even if so
early, the titles Christos (8:29) and son of God already show Pauline influence.
Matthew and Luke are expansion of Mark and what influenced that gospel influenced the others.

7
Including the Fourth Gospel: by the time it was written S/Pauls view of Jesus as a divine figure was
already basic to the new belief system, but was being developed further. The majority of scholars seem correct
in dating it too late to be of any use to the scholar looking for the historical figure of Jesus.

8
But I must be honest: James Crossley was kind enough to read this, though before I rewrote it somewhat.

Add to:

Comments (16)

Philip,

Thanks for this addition to the conversation. I might make one small adjustment though--I do not argue that Jesus was invented. I only argue that Paul's Jesus was not the historical earthly Jesus. Of course, that has no direct bearing on historicity.

I particularly like your conclusions and your discussion of the current troubles of New Testament minimalists.

Tom

#1 - Tom Verenna - 08/29/2012 - 18:48

"The use in this particular case of such mythic types ought to have been provoked by something, and the existence of a guru of some kind is more plausible and economical than any other explanation—which, by the way, does not necessarily make it the right one"

I have no problem with this extract I have picked out; it's rational and plausible; but, I would like to counter with the cue nature of Jesus's name. For the 'Saviour' to be called 'God's Salvation' is slightly suspicious from a 'historical' (to me anyway)? And is something Prof. Thompson has broached.

To clarify, I am actually agnostic on the matter myself.

#2 - Sean - 08/30/2012 - 01:16

Philip,
Interesting essay, thanks.

Alas, I have not yet seen a copy of _Is This Not the Carpenter_, so I have not yet seen my own essay, much less any of the others. But if my published essay is similar to the one that I wrote, then I have presented a thesis and evidence to answer this question of yours: You wrote: "The problem at the heart of the Historical Jesus quests is to get behind S/Paul to some earlier historical knowledge. It’s hard to see that we can..." The evidence is in Paul's rhetorical structure. The Jesus in that evidence is not any Jesus found in the Gospels, and it is not a Jesus that will satisfy a traditionalist theologian, but it is, in my view, a probable portrait of the guy.

I do hope the volume starts a worthwhile conversation in academe.

Shalom,
K.L.

#3 - K. L. Noll - 08/30/2012 - 13:18

Whether or not there was a historical person called Jesus / Yeshua, it's pretty clear that a lot of the stories about him were invented or appropriated from other semi-divine figures.

Analogous examples of someone who may have been based on a historical person, but attracted other legends to their corpus of myth, are King Arthur and Robin Hood. There probably was a 6th-century Celtic warlord who managed to fend off the Saxon invasions for a bit, but he probably didn't pull a sword out of a stone or have a court in Camelot. There were several early medieval outlaws on whom Robin Hood may have been based.

An example of a completely fictional hero who many people believed was real was Ned Ludd.

#4 - Yewtree - 08/30/2012 - 13:23

I think the problem with the whole "did Jesus exist?" debate is that for many people, any claims of his existence means that he was divine. It really needs to be hammered home that perhaps a version of Jesus existed but there is absolutely no evidence for miracles or divinity.

And ultimately, if Jesus was not the son of god, then what's the big deal? It renders getting inspiration from the bible as no different than getting inspiration from any other work of fiction.

#5 - Chris Quartly - 08/30/2012 - 13:43

Agnosticism was ridiculed already by Aristotle in 4th B.C.
Yes, details(in Bible) are debatable; well, how to explain a simple historical data: first Christians were ready to be martyred by not bowing down at Cesar-god statue for the Lord (Jesus) - a fiction????
If they were not, the author would be now still at the age of worshipping trees, stones, Cesar statues, or Torah tablets in stoneTemple as divine artifacts. Suffering, innocent victims of tyrans;ex.Auschwitz@Gulags - how do you explain it without the sense of the cross, i.e., the historical experience of the vindication of Jesus from Nazareth. You can try to undermine any historical document as a fiction- have a fun

#6 - Krzysztof - 08/30/2012 - 14:42

Dear Kurt,

Thanks for this note. The copies for North America have not yet arrived (they are coming by boat--I have not yet received my copy either) but I am told they should be here by the end of the week and should ship out next week to those who have ordered them, to contributors, to additional reviewers, and to distributors. (I've been tenacious in tracking them down--the good people at Equinox and ISD are probably tired of getting emails from me)

As for your essay, I did enjoy it greatly. I think it is an excellent contribution towards the question of Christian origins. Your statement here about Paul presenting a "probable portrait of the guy [Jesus]" is precisely what my chapter argues against. For example, you write in your paper:

"Likewise, the letters of Paul explicitly expect the reader to accept Paul’s crucified Christ as a real, flesh-and-blood human who was the victim of execution by real-world authorities (1 Cor. 1:23)." (I don't have the book yet, but should be around p. 257)

But I argue that this is precisely what Paul didn't mean; that this reading is the result of interpreting Paul through the lens of a Gospel tradition that is engrained within most of New Testament scholarship. Of course, my arguments could be wrong. That said, I do hope you will send me a note (or even publish a response somewhere) with your thoughts on it after you read it.

Like you, I also hope that this is the beginning of a fruitful discussion on these issues. But, more than that, I also hope that we can start shifting focus *away* from the historicity of Jesus. One of the goals of mine was to demonstrate that these questions--did Jesus exist, did he not exist, what color was he, etc.--are distracting us all from the far more interesting ones.

Tom

#7 - Thomas Verenna - 08/30/2012 - 15:08

The whole "Jesus is a myth" vogue is simply the ultimate extension of the anti-Jewish tendencies in Bible scholarship. Our scholastic pseudo-elite would rather have no historical Christ at all than a merely human, ie. purely Jewish, Christ.

#8 - Barrett Pashak - 08/30/2012 - 19:55

The philosophical commonplace that 'existence is not a predicate' is not beyond critique but there's enough sense in it for it to deserve attention. The question should be what collection of predicates or descriptions can be applied with rational confidence to any person who was of that name and is of interest aroused by the NT. There are, to put it mildly, many current answers to that question.
If the answer to that question is 'In effect, none' then 'Jesus' becomes in effect 'someone, we know not who'. A person without identifiable qualities can play no part in empirical history any more than 'something, we know not what' can, as Locke pointed out, play a part in empirical philosophy.
If the answer is 'something significant' then we can write a biography which has some validity. The difference between 'we know not who' and 'we know him well' emerges progressively, ie there is no one moment of dramatic transition, but it is still a significant difference. The question for those interested in the topic of Jesus is not 'Did he exist?' but 'Supposing he existed, what can we say of him? Nothing much or something significant?'

#9 - Martin - 08/30/2012 - 21:33

The revolutionary leader Joshua/Jesus is talked of in Josephus´ "Antiquities of the Jews", book 18, chapter 4, verse 1. He took his followers up on a mountain to start a rebellion and got executed by Pilate, or at least his troops. Whether this Joshua/Jesus was beheaded on Mount Gerizim or when the troops got hold of him elsewhere can´t be said with certainty. I seriously doubt that he was tried by Pilate and then crucified since it does not fit the ending of other rebels. That part of christian mythology is just a story, not history.

As for the eyewitnesses of the resurrected Christ there´s no doubt in my mind that these eyewitnesses actually belived that James the Just had risen from the dead.

After the vicious attack on him by his persecutor Saul on the top of the temple stairs, James fell all the way to the ground, seeemingly dead. Many saw what they believed was his dead body being carried away by his followers. Yet he appeared to them alive later on. No wonder some seemed to have believed that this pious jew had been raised from the dead by the archangel Michael or perhaps this angel used James´body as his vessel on earth.

The Jesus of the gospels are most certainly a fictional character, but it would be unjust to forget the real person behind the major contribution to the christian Jesus saga, namely James the Just.

The samaritan prophet is not really a good contender for the title "historical Jesus", the best choice for that title has to be James the Just. Mind you, it´s not really that hard to separate what is James and what is Joshua in christian mythology, if you just put your mind to it.

An intriguing question is of course why scholars seems to be unable, or unwilling, to connect the dots?

#10 - Kent Backman - 08/30/2012 - 22:36

Kent, they may be unwilling to connect the dots, because there's zero evidence for anything you've said? You seem to have jumped to unwarranted conclusions, the rationale of which I can't conceive.

#11 - Sean - 08/31/2012 - 20:41

Now remember in Galatians..Paul wrote he went up to Jerusalem and met none of the Lord's disciples/followers except Peter and he spoke with James whom he called "The Lord's brother" I hold that Paul did NOT use "brother" in association with Peter. That here Paul was not talking about a "brother in the faith" but a blood brother. Paul's Jesus was of the seed of David, born of a woman, was betrayed and broke bread and passed the cup with his followers. A Jesus of Nazareth or Jesus the Nazarene is as likely to have existed to me as Nazareth did in the first century. (the idea Nazareth did not exist, I hold, has been refuted rather well by atheist Richard Carrier's research). What I find missing from Paul's early letter to the Galatians is not an earthly Jesus, but ascent of the doctrine of the virgin birth with is taught in two of the gospels and a foundational doctrine of The Roman Catholic Church. Isn't it odd that Paul claims to have met Peter whom Paul and early church tradition hold as a close friend/follower of Jesus and James, whom Paul labels "The Lord's Brother" which also is clearly supported by ancient church tradition, the early church fathers, early Christian apologist Origen and probably Josephus...but such a fantastic birth is NOT mentioned in Galatians or ANY of Paul's genuine letters! Did Peter and the Lord's brother James neglect to inform Paul of such a birth? Or did Paul not think it worth mentioning? Or did the virgin birth doctrine in about 50CE lay in the future?

#12 - larry - 09/18/2012 - 16:36

This is one long sentence!!!

Such a normal exercise should hardly generate controversy in most fields of ancient history, but of course New Testament studies is not a normal case and the highly emotive and dismissive language of, say, Bart Ehrman’s response to Thompson’s The Mythic Past shows (if it needed to be shown), not that the matter is beyond dispute, but that the whole idea of raising this question needs to be attacked, ad hominem, as something outrageous.

#13 - Dude - 02/01/2013 - 05:55

People seem to be sliding by what I consider the only truly important point in the relationship of a historical Jesus to Christianity. This point is expressed in the sentence, "Jesus died for our sins."

Without a Redemption, there is no Christianity and the whole point of the Redemption is that "God became Man" in order to take on the sins of mankind and to die in expiation of them. Aron and Dave mentioned it, briefly, when they discussed the scapegoat when telling the Barabbas story, but it is absolutely foundational to Christianity.

God, being sinless, could not possibly tolerate taking sin to himself. Ignoring the silliness of a god who has to go through all of these hoops and can't just say, "I forgive you.", in order for human sin to be forgiven, it must be taken on by a human figure. But, since all men are already sinful, from conception, that wouldn't work unless the figure were also divine and born sinless. It is only by having a divine/human hybrid making a willing sacrifice that the Redemption can possibly be valid.

If there is no historical Jesus, there is no Redemption and Christianity shatters like a mirror shot by a .44.

#14 - Russ Williams - 10/04/2014 - 23:59

"I have not trawled through the massive secondary literature. But the primary and secondary sources are few: what else is there to read?"

It never ceases to amaze me how two different people can look at what would appear to be the same evidence and come to vastly different conclusions. Perhaps the problem with Mr. Davies is his poor trawling skills, which lead to the erroneous conclusion that "the rather fragile historical evidence for Jesus" is really fragile?

Bart Ehrman writes,

"The question is not whether sources are biased but whether biased sources can be used to yield historically reliable information, once their biased chaff is separated from the historical kernel. And historians have devised ways of doing just that.

"With respect to Jesus, we have numerous, independent accounts of his life in the sources lying behind the Gospels (and the writings of Paul) -- sources that originated in Jesus' native tongue Aramaic and that can be dated to within just a year or two of his life (before the religion moved to convert pagans in droves). Historical sources like that are is pretty astounding for an ancient figure of any kind. Moreover, we have relatively extensive writings from one first-century author, Paul, who acquired his information within a couple of years of Jesus' life and who actually knew, first hand, Jesus' closest disciple Peter and his own brother James. If Jesus did not exist, you would think his brother would know it.

"Moreover, the claim that Jesus was simply made up falters on every ground. The alleged parallels between Jesus and the "pagan" savior-gods in most instances reside in the modern imagination: We do not have accounts of others who were born to virgin mothers and who died as an atonement for sin and then were raised from the dead (despite what the sensationalists claim ad nauseum in their propagandized versions)."

Davies' dismissive attack upon Bart Ehrman is reduced to one sentence:

"Such a normal exercise should hardly generate controversy in most fields of ancient history, but of course New Testament studies is not a normal case and the highly emotive and dismissive language of, say, Bart Ehrman’s response to Thompson’s The Mythic Past shows (if it needed to be shown), not that the matter is beyond dispute, but that the whole idea of raising this question needs to be attacked, ad hominem, as something outrageous."

Here, Davies moves from speaking of a "normal exercise" to "Bart Ehrman's response" to "this question." What "question" is being referred to here, and what is it's logical and referential connection to "normal exercise", "Bart Ehrman's response", or anything Ehrman has written, for that matter?

#15 - Dan Tobias - 04/19/2015 - 07:46

Friends
Alas, i am not a scholar (an M.A. in Biblical Theology from a catholic seminary is all) but an avid student of them.I've read everything i could find by as many authors who contribute anything of a substantial nature to the historicity of biblical figures and myths.I find the entire field facinating.However i am finding more and more that discussions are interrupted by confessional beliefs that share little or nothing of historical value.

Thanks to all your amazing work time.
Rick Sieber Philadelphia

#16 - rick sieber - 10/15/2015 - 04:09

Use the form below to submit a new comment. Comments are moderated
and logged, and may be edited. You must provide your full name.
Inappropriate material will not be posted. Please do not post inappropriate web sites, they will be deleted.